"If you're a mainstream business site (including government and non-profit sites), your user experience needs are very different than those of the few hot sites that attract all the attention."
This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what to do on the page.
"For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes 1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is more important than efficiency for done-once actions."
Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)
This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what to do on the page.
"For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes 1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is more important than efficiency for done-once actions."
Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)